Jim Baggott explores how our understanding of the nature of matter, and its fundamental property of mass, has developed, from the ancient Greek view of indivisible atoms to quantum mechanics, dark matter, the Higgs field, and beyond. He shows how the stuff of the universe is proving more elusive and uncertain than we ever imagined.

"The Standard Model" of particle physics is a description of the fundamental particles, the quarks and leptons, and the forces between them. The Standard Model also explains the origin of mass, which predicts the existence of the Higgs boson, the last undetected particle in the Standard Model. This thesis presents a search for the Standard Model Higgs boson in the "H ->bb" decay channel in 1.96 TeV proton-antiproton collisions. This search is based on the data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.3/fb collected by the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. To improve this search sensitivity, sophisticated multivariate techniques are employed. Through the use of these techniques, the analysis achieves an observed (expected) 95% confidence level upper limit of 5.26 (3.98) times the theoretically expected production cross section for the Standard Model Higgs boson with a mass of 115 GeV/c^2. This result represents a substantial improvement in sensitivity over the previous result, the increase in sensitivity is 26%.

Everything around us is made of 'stuff', from planets, to books, to our own bodies. Whatever it is, we call it matter or material substance. It is solid; it has mass. But what is matter, exactly? We are taught in school that matter is not continuous, but discrete. As a few of the philosophers of ancient Greece once speculated, nearly two and a half thousand years ago, matter comes in 'lumps', and science has relentlessly peeled away successive layers of matter to reveal its ultimate constituents. Surely, we can't keep doing this indefinitely. We imagine that we should eventually run up against some kind of ultimately fundamental, indivisible type of stuff, the building blocks from which everything in the Universe is made. The English physicist Paul Dirac called this 'the dream of philosophers'. But science has discovered that the foundations of our Universe are not as solid or as certain and dependable as we might have once imagined. They are instead built from ghosts and phantoms, of a peculiar quantum kind. And, at some point on this exciting journey of scientific discovery, we lost our grip on the reassuringly familiar concept of mass. How did this happen? How did the answers to our questions become so complicated and so difficult to comprehend? In Mass Jim Baggott explains how we come to find ourselves here, confronted by a very different understanding of the nature of matter, the origin of mass, and its implications for our understanding of the material world. Ranging from the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, and their theories of atoms and void, to the development of quantum field theory and the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle, he explores our changing understanding of the nature of matter, and the fundamental related concept of mass.

The theory of knowledge, or epistemology, is often regarded as a dry topic that bears little relation to actual knowledge practices. Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History addresses this perception by showing the roots, developments and prospects of modern epistemology from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with an introduction to the central questions and problems in theory of knowledge, Steve Fuller goes on to demonstrate that contemporary epistemology is enriched by its interdisciplinarity, analysing keys areas including: Epistemology as Cognitive Economics Epistemology as Divine Psychology Epistemology as Philosophy of Science Epistemology as Sociology of Science Epistemology and Postmodernism. A wide-ranging and historically-informed assessment of the ways in which man has - and continues to - pursue, question, contest, expand and shape knowledge, this book is essential reading anyone in the Humanities and Social Sciences interested in the history and practical application of epistemology.

The Quest for Press Freedom is a book about press development and freedom in Ethiopia, with a focus on the state media. It examines the building of a modern media institution over the last one hundred years of its existence, and the restrictions against its freedoms. The significance of this work lies in its originality and that it addresses these two issues across three distinct epochs: the monarchy era, the Marxist military regime, and the current ethnic federalist regime. The book examines the political and social situations in each of these periods, and analyzes the effects they had on the media. The book also provides examples of how journalists working for the government-run media have a strong desire to exercise their constitutional right to press freedom. In the final chapter, Reta offers recommendations for a more viable media system in Ethiopia.

The Kobayashi-Maskawa Institute for the Origin of Particles and the Universe (KMI) was founded at Nagoya University in 2010 under the directorship of T Maskawa, in celebration of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for M Kobayashi and T Maskawa, both who are alumni of Nagoya University. In commemoration of the new KMI building in 2011, the KMI Inauguration Conference (KMIIN) was organized to discuss perspectives of various fields OCo both theoretical and experimental studies of particle physics and astrophysics OCo as the main objectives of the KMI activity.This proceedings contains a welcome address by T Maskawa conveying his hopes for KMI to create new revolutionary directions in the spirit of Shoichi Sakata, a great mentor of both Maskawa and Kobayashi. Invited speakers, world-leading scientists in the fields, and the young scientists at KMI contributed to this volume containing theoretical studies of strongly coupled gauge theories in view of LHC phenomenology, string theory approach and lattice studies as well as hot/dense QCD system, and also super-symmetric GUT models, etc., together with experimental studies of LHC physics, B physics, neutrino physics and the related astrophysics and cosmology. The volume yields a unique synergy of particle physics and astrophysics, closely related to the main activity of KMI encompassing particle theory (including lattice computer simulations), particle physics experiments, cosmology, and astrophysics observations."